How Many Hits? Web Analytics for Lawyers

In my experience, lawyers like to talk about “hits” to their websites and blogs. And while the term “hits” makes me cringe (it isn’t very descriptive and is very outdated), ignoring your web analytics data limits your ability to understand your online audience.

And while your audience may provide feedback in other ways (commenting, subscribing, liking, etc), it’s what they’re not saying that may prove even more valuable. This is where web analytics comes into play.
The Digital Analytics Association defines web analytics as:

the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage.

In other words, it tracks how internet users interact with with web pages and provides a means by which to analyze their behaviors.

If this is the first time you’re hearing about web analytics, I strongly encourage you to learn some basics and add some tracking code to your site. Even some basic visitor traffic measurements can provide you powerful insights about from where your visitors are coming and how they’re interacting with your pages.

If you are already familiar with web analytics, you might want to skip down to the tips section. Hopefully you will learn something new.

If you pay someone to monitor, manage and report on web analytics data, I encourage you to ask some pointed questions about your visitor traffic statistics.

Direct Traffic: How do the people who clicked a bookmark to come to your site or typed your site URL into their browser compare to the “average” visitor to your site? Direct traffic can include visitors recruited via offline (i.e. print, television) campaigns.

Referring Sites: How do the people referred from other sites compare to the “average” visitor to your site? The graph shows the overall trends in traffic volume from referrals while the table lists the sites driving the trends.

Search Engines: How does search engine traffic compare to traffic as a whole to your site? The graph shows overall trends while the table lists the search engines driving the trends.

If you can get a handle on the basic visitor metrics and traffic sources, you will be off to a pretty good start.

Choosing a Web Analytics Software Solution

There are a variety of web analytics solutions from which to choose. Some are free, some are prohibitively expensive. There are a variety of reasons for choosing between these different options.

That’s all you need to do to start collecting data. The next step is to analyze it and put it to good use. If you’re interested in learning about some of the more advanced functionality of GA, I recommend the following resources from Google:

Focus on Actionable Insights – Who are you trying to get to your web pages and what are you trying to get them to do? Without specific analytics objectives, you will likely find yourself diving down the data rabbit hole becoming overwhelmed with all sorts of statistics that don’t really matter. From there, you’ll likely draw all sorts of false assumptions. Stick to Avinash’s Trinity: A Mindset & Strategic Approach

Avoid False Assumptions & Generalizations – Once you start analyzing your data, you will likely fall victim to making false assumptions. For example, many people tend to hyper-focus on bounce rate. However, in some situations, bounce rate can be an indication that a visitor came to your site, found what they were looking for and left. This isn’t necessarily a “bad” thing (especially if your site is a blog).

Design & Implement Goals and Funnels – Goals and funnels allow you to track specific objectives. For example, you may want to track how many people reach a certain page on your site or perform a specific action (like downloading an informational resource).

Working With a Web Analytics Consultant

If you don’t have the time, interest or desire to learn the intricacies of analyzing web analytics data, you can always hire someone to help you. However, if you’re going to hire a consultant, be sure to properly vet them. Search for a qualified individual or Certified Partner. Beware of folks that have created their own certification badges.

Stay in regular communication with your analytics consultant. Make sure you lay out the specific objectives and goals that you wish to achieve.

As you can probably tell, web analytics data analysis can get a bit complex. However, if you stick to analyzing the basics and stay objective-oriented, you will probably be surprised by the insights that visitor feedback provides.

Gyi Tsakalakis helps lawyers earn meaningful attention online because that's where clients are looking. He tends to write about legal marketing technology. He misses coaching football and is happy to discuss various strategies and techniques of defensive front seven play.

4 Comments

I, too, hate the term hits because I never know what the people who use it are referring to. I generally think in terms of pageviews and unique visitors, and ignore anything that says hits because I don’t know what it means.

(For comparison, Lawyerist got about 231,000 pageviews per month according to Google Analytics. But our server analytics show over 1.4 million “hits.”)

The reality is that most firm website really don’t have anything other than info for those that need the lawyer. It’s not like there is games or giveaways. So worrying about big hits or visits really isn’t worth it. You can always pay for a thousand one second hits to feel better, but much more helpful to hand the money off at the next highway off ramp.

Yeah, (not provided) can be frustrating. However, so long as Google doesn’t totally remove keyword data, there is still much to be gleaned about keyword trends from other tools (i.e. webmaster tools, google suggest, related searches, etc).